[ I N - D E P T H
and insurance, professional services,
and IT.
A worrying shortage
After a very quick Google search it
seemed that Columbia University
had one of the top courses in data
science around the world.
Rachel Fuld Cohen is a career de-
velopment officer at the university’s
data science institute and says that
there has been a spike in applications
to the masters programme.
“Our core courses, such as machine
learning, algorithms, and exploratory
data analysis and visualisation are
receiving interest from students in
programmes throughout the univer-
sity,” she explains.
David Yao, a professor at Co-
lumbia’s department of industrial
engineering and operations research,
runs the centre for financial business
analytics.
“The whole field of data science
and data analytics is in huge de-
mand,” he says. “That demand has
changed our programme and our
curriculum, and has shifted away
from pricing.
“In New York City, suddenly all the
universities have these programmes.
Overall I would say data science is
a relatively new field and we are
only now seeing lots of these places
setting up these programmes.”
The Harvard Business Review
wrote in 2016 that the shortage of
data scientists is becoming “a serious
constraint” for certain sectors. For-
tunately the number of students and
courses are both expanding.
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D ATA
S C I E N T I S T S ]
Part of the enticement might be
that the IBM study found employ-
ers were willing to pay up to $8,736
above the median bachelor’s and
graduate-level salaries for data
scientists.
Can finance be fun?
So fingers crossed, the number of
graduates is looking set to increase
in the coming years, but for now the
conversation remains that from the
relatively small pool, do they want to
come and work in custodian banks,
or will the lure of companies like
FAANG (Facebook, Amazon, Apple,
Netflix and Google) be too tempting
to ignore?
Michael Di Amore is a recent
graduate with a masters degree in
data science at Columbia University
Spring 2018
globalcustodian.com
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